The Stoned Apocalypse Read Free Page B

eighty-page issue that weren’t covered with shots of naked women — nipples and buttocks exposed, pubic hair forbidden. During the five months I worked there, I looked at over five thousand sets of photographs of women without clothes.
    One afternoon, up to my elbows in editorial confusion, I received a phone call from Joan, whom I hadn’t seen since leaving Americana. She and her husband, Douglas, wanted me over for dinner. This surprised me since Mrs. R. allowed no unauthorized fraternization among her students. But I was glad at a chance to pick up information.
    They lived in a perfectly decorated apartment in the West Fifties. Douglas was an industrial designer, almost forty, and wore a great bushy moustache à la Gurdjieff. In keeping with the fact that Gurdjieff loved to drink and Ouspensky was down on drugs, they packed away a lot of booze during the evening and spoke disparagingly about marijuana. “I used to smoke charge,” Douglas said, using a term that hadn’t been current for fifteen years.
    They were quite stern in refusing to answer any of my questions about Mrs. R. but spoke quite freely about themselves. “I first read Ouspensky ten years ago,” Douglas said, “and I knew I had to follow that path. So I came to New York and sought out the Foundation. I’ve been with them ever since.”
    He was utterly committed, without a doubt concerning the rightness of his way of life. It was simultaneously admirable and infuriating. I noticed with them what has often been noted about people in the Work by those outside of it: that they never seemed totally at ease, they seemed always somehow to be watching, to be acting from some privileged platform. There was the unmistakable aroma of orthodoxy about them. Later, I was to understand that, as Brendan Behan notes about the Irish, the Gurdjieffites “are quite popular among themselves”; and their approach to life, despite its peculiarities, lends itself to a sanity and sobriety which contrasts sharply with the collective insanity of the species.
    The evening may have been a screening of some sort, for the next day Mrs. R. told me that I could attend group meetings. “This doesn’t mean I have decided to take you on as a student,” she said, and continued with a lecture that made my back teeth ache. “You must be serious about the Work. It can chew you up. I will tolerate absolutely no nonsense from you. You can fool everyone in the world, but you can’t fool me. Also you’ll be asked to pay a fee.” The fee turned out to be twenty-five dollars a month, about which her comment was, “You’d have to pay twice as much for an hour with a mere psychiatrist and not begin to get what you’ll get here.”
    The meetings were held in a renovated brownstone in midtown off Park Avenue. The ambience was that of a Los Angeles funeral parlor. Everyone walked around being terribly aware. Conversations were held in whispered tones. Seriousness seeped from the walls.
    The major activity during each group was the reporting of observations each of us had made of ourselves during the week. In Gurdjieff’s regimen the student spent perhaps several years simply taking mental snapshots of basic behavior: posture, gesture, facial expression, movement, and tone of voice. This is considered necessary to rid the individual of all sorts of preconceptions, misconceptions, and fantasies he may have about himself.
    About thirty of us sat in five or six rows of chairs facing the front of the room. Everyone maintained a totally still pose and a zombie-like silence. The point, I imagine, was to re-collect ourselves to be ready for the guru when she entered. But there was something about the enforced behavior which was oppressive; there was no ease or spontaneity, no joy of the moment. The mood was one of psychic constipation.
    Usually she had us sit there for over an hour past the appointed time. And when she entered, it was with one or another form of put-down. “Well, what have you